Despite
the violence that erupted around the European Union summit in Sweden,
anarchists and EU leaders seem to have one thing in common: a growing
distrust of the United States, their former Cold War ally. Bush's
America seems determined to strike out on its own. European powers
France, Germany and England, meanwhile, grapple over two burning
questions: "Who will lead the EU?" and "Does the EU
really need America?"

Now read Culturekiosque
contributor Marco Schütz's review of several books examining the
growing strains within Europe and between the EU and the US.

By
Marco Schütz

PARIS,
16 June 2001 - "Watch out, the process of globalization,
lacking logic and seeking modernity, will inevitable lead us all to
MacDonalds." That is the warning issued by François
Guillaume, député, former Minister and leader of the
agricultural lobby, in a book that has been published recently by Lattès,
to denounce Le Complot des maîtres du pouvoir (The
Plot of Our Rulers). In his opinion, Europe is hardly better than
America: the bureaucracy of Brussels is little more than a Trojan horse
carrying Anglo-Saxon economic liberalism in order to impose it on the
member states of the European Union.

What is true for
agro-alimentary and cultural issues is even stronger in the case of
world political crisis: The Kosovo
conflict is but a striking illustration. Washington, scorning the
lessons of the tormented history of the Balkans and following its own
interests which are the opposite of the Europeans, decided to use NATO,
the secular arm of its empire, to intervene in Yugoslavia. All the
Europeans did was get down on their knees to align themselves with
American policy.

But the Euro-skeptics are not the only ones
in France to denounce the arrogance of the United States. Even among
convinced Europeans, a number of voices has been raised to send Uncle
Sam back to his own continent while European problems are resolved
within the framework of the Union. The French ideologists of a coming
European super-power hope that the British and especially the Germans
will finally free themselves from the claws of the Americans. This dream
of the Socialist senator Pierre Barnès, which is not dissimilar
from that of General de Gaulle, was formulated in 1998 in his book Le
XXIe Siècle ne sera pas américain (The 21st
Century Will Not Be American; du Rocher): It is Germany that in a
few years could well become the biggest disappointment to the Americans,
even if today Berlin continues to behave like one of the best students
of the Euro-Atlantic class, to the immense satisfaction of the Yankee
master.

This opinion resembles that of Pierre Delmas. With the
deliberately provacative title of his latest book, De la prochaine
guerre avec l'Allemagne (About The Next War With Germany;
Odile Jacob), this énarque tries to rid the French of their
underlying fear of Germany. Delmas also calls for a return to the
European policy advocated in his time by de Gaulle. Based on centralism
and a certain "culture of power," the old French nation should
in his opinion once again take over European affairs and block the
Americans - with the assistance of a Germany that has undoubtedly been
reunified, but is still uncertain as a nation and without a strong
identity. For Delmas, there is no other hope, without French leadership,
he explains, and building Europe definitely risks failure through a
resurgence of the historic Franco-German affrontment.

"Mistake!",
exclaims the philosopher and media expert Régis Debray in his
latest book, Le code et le glaive (The Code and The Sword;
Albin Michel / Fondation Marc-Bloch). Someone who has made the front
page of the newspapers by daring to voice his opinions of
NATO's actions in Kosovo,
Debray wishes that hypocrisy would cease. The unofficial plan for a
defensive alliance run by Paris and Berlin against the double supremacy
(politico-military and economico-cultural) of the United States results
from a French narcissistic illusion. In European affairs, each nation
thinks only of its own interests: "The English are working towards
an Anglo-Saxon Europe, the French
for a French Europe, the Germans for a German Europe," etc.
And in this race for ulterior motives it is not France but Germany that
seems to be winning. Debray thinks it inevitable that Brussels gets
along better with Berlin than with Paris because the European allocation
of competences (following the principle of subsidiarity) is based on an
extension of the German model: federalism. Germany thus feels closer to
the United States than to any other partner.

Debray also
states that France stands to lose much more than any other nation in the
"planing down of [national] peculiarities" which is at the
heart of the European Union. For him, the republican model is
incompatible with a liberal democracy inspired by the United States -
i.e. organized around the free play of private interests. His book could
be considered a manifesto of the Marc Bloch Foundation, a group of
leftish nationalist intellectuals founded two years ago, close to theMouvement
des Citoyens (Citizens' Movement) of Jean-Pierre Chevènement,
who is a militant of such Jacobin values as centralism and secularity.
Its members include well-known academics and journalists as Jean-François
Kahn, founder of the weekly Marianne. Identified as
national-republican by the daily paper Le Monde, the group knows
no fear when it comes to attacking Europe: right after its creation, the
Fondation contacted the former Minister of the Interior, Charles Pasqua,
who had announced his intention to found a new party assembling the
partisans of sovereignty, to the right of the right, following the
success of his list in the European elections.

Whether from the
right or left, anti-Americanism and anti-Germanism often go together.
Thus the Belgian Marxist journalist Michel Collon considers Germany and
the United States solely responsible for the breaking down of Tito's
Yugoslavia and the wars that have been destroying the Balkans for almost
ten years. For Bonn, this crisis offered the possibility of controlling
all of central Europe from the Baltic to the Mediterranean, Collon
affirms in his book Poker menteur; EPO, Bruxelles). Moreover,
the war in Yugoslavia offered a means for the Kohl government to force
London and Paris to accept its own strategy. By selling weapons to the
ex-Yugoslav secessionist republics, the politicians in Bonn were simply
reactivating an old formula of Nazi imperialism. Following the same
anti-German line, we might also mention the work of Yvonne Bollmann,
La Tentation allemande (The German Temptation;
Michalon). This scholar of German history implicitly accuses the Germans
of wanting to take back Alsace-Lorraine by way of European
regionalization, a theory that led to her being the guest of honor of
the Académie du Gaullisme. Jacques Dauer, the secretary-general
of that organization and close to Charles Pasqua, was one of the first
to sign the anti-NATO manifesto, Non à la guerre (No to
the war), launched by the group of extreme rightist intellectuals
gathered around Alain de Benoist..